Ingrid, being a teenager, spends more and more of her waking time in her own room, doing her own stuff. I see less of her than I used to.

She does come down when she has a particularly large chunk of particularly boring homework to cram. She enjoys subjects where learning means understanding and reasoning, such as math and science. Even some parts of social studies, such as when they worked with ethics. But subjects such as history and geography on grade school level mostly means cramming facts. Names, years, terms…

The best way for Ingrid to learn those is to tell them to someone else, out loud. Today we did “home skills”. She has a test coming up soon, on the topic of food ingredients: meats, grains, dairy, vegetables etc. So she went through all her notes and told me all the facts. What inner temperature should pork be cooked to? What is margarine? What are pulses? What is the difference between hard cheese and cream cheese? Mostly sort of useful facts, but learning them by heart for a test is maybe not the best way…